Essential Films
Chapter 15

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A Day in the Life of a Coal Miner
Charles Urban
Kineto Films / UK / 1910

Produced by: Charles Urban

Ion Martea
posted 26 February 2007

When the Lumière brothers shot La sortie des usines Lumière [Leaving the Lumière Factory] (Louis Lumière/France/1895), they were proud of being able to show what motion pictures can do to capture real life. As the medium developed, however, they felt that this capacity was diminished. If film was about capturing reality, the manipulation of this recorded material was a travesty. From the perspective of these social documentary photographers, what cinema evolved into was an artificial medium, and the original purpose of preserving the true face of history was defeated.

Cinema quickly found its place as a substitute for theatre, though at first it was considered less worthy, as it couldn't convey the spoken language so dear to thespians at the turn of the century. What cinema was good at was entertaining the public with comedic sketches whose unique selling point was the use of editing and post-production special effects. With few notable exceptions, film was the realm of base entertainment. Even in the case of the exceptions, the quality of those pictures was recognised mainly in retrospect, by film critics and historians trying to understand the development of the medium. Arguably, aside from the film-makers themselves, only a limited number of movie-goers would defend the medium as a 'seventh art'.

As for documentary, production companies found it unprofitable to exhibit footage of social events, and by 1910, the Lumières' thought the genre doomed. Kineto's A Life in the Day of a Coal Miner was to prove the French brothers wrong. The British film, which was later considered a milestone in the history of documentary, was different from other non-fiction films of the time in that the accent was not simply on showing events-as-they-happened to the public, but rather on instruction and analysis.

It is remarkable how dated the structure of A Day in the Life of a Coal Miner seems, but on closer inspection the film has all the ingredients that would make a modern documentary a critically acclaimed blockbuster. It is when we judge each individual element separately - namely: narration, staging, photography and writing - that the film seems dated, but the use of all four in combination is what makes A Day in the Life of a Coal Miner the precursor to the modern documentary.

Though there is no audio narration, the intertitles act as the voice that explains what is happening in the film. Each chapter starts with an encompassing title, dictating how we are to interpret the scene. The titles emphasise practical activity rather than eliciting empathy, so that in watching the coal miner leaving his house in the morning, then seeing his daily hardships in the depths of the earth, we do not focus as such on the character (ie the miner), but rather on the activity (ie mining), as instructed. Unlike in Leaving the Lumière Factory, where our subjective reaction is essential to our appreciation of the film, Kineto's documentary is prescriptive. It is this element of instruction that began to differentiate documentary from fictional cinema.

The film is thus not about capturing reality directly on film, but presenting us with an a priori view of reality. Each chapter is a staged sequence which does nothing but act out the activity promised to us in the intertitle. The issue of whether the mining process is shown to us by an actual worker or an actor is secondary to the essence of that activity. Even though the title promises a character study, it is clear that what we must be interested in, as viewers, is not the human but the economic essence of the coal miner. Therefore, the accusation that A Life in the Day of a Coal Miner presents us with a distorted vision of the world is to miss the fact that documentaries are effective only if they have something to say. When they do, the precise form of how the information is presented on screen becomes irrelevant. By staging individual sequences, the film does not depart from documentation, nor does it approach fiction; for what is presented is not an emphatic narrative, but an analytic one.

Returning to the Lumières' pessimism about the possibility of documentaries in a cinema corrupted by post-production effects, then, it is not difficult to see that the fear, though well-grounded conceptually, is misplaced if a documentary is defined as an information-driven genre, rather than image-driven. If we step back to photography and consider Jeff Wall's A View from an Apartment (2004-2005), for example, the work is a great piece of social documentary art, despite its pain-stakingly staged digital composition, because how the image was constructed is irrelevant when trying to understand the dichotomy between our private and our public life. What we focus on is the essence of light and warmth of the flat, and the mechanical steel works seen through the window, perhaps asking ourselves if the two are as different as we might have assumed. In 1910, A Life in the Day of a Coal Miner used precisely the same structure in presenting the information. The staged sequences, beyond their straightforward demonstration of the mining process, also make use of creative photography. Kineto thus proves that documentary can take its place a respectable genre of art cinema without diminishing its specific role, purely because by employing technology, it operates on a cinematographic level, which in turn enhances our understanding of the information we are made to digest, by appealing to our sensory capacities.

With the development of the medium in this way, Kineto managed to employ not only technical elements, but also a script, in order to make A Life in the Day of a Coal Miner a new kind of documentary, which was to become the mainstream form for documentaries for the next century. The narration, the staging and the photography are all intrinsic parts of the script, which allow the film-maker to use cinema as an effective tool for documenting the past, the present, the known, and the obscure, to help us extend our intellectual horizon.

Great documentaries, which are also great cinema, do not stop at that, and A Life in the Day of a Coal Miner is a great example of this. Beyond the potential to document, cinema offers a chance to interact with the information. The rather positive mood of the narrative is interestingly shaken by two scenes, which appear more out of place, rather than essential to the narrative. In the first, two young workers stare and smile into the camera, both looking much worse-off than they seem to want us to believe. The other is the epilogue, showing a middle class family enjoying their evening by the fire. By contrasting these two scenes, it is clear that the film-makers are not only informing us, but they also ask us to think.

Paramount to the structure is that analysis cannot occur prior to understanding. Kineto's documentary seems dated comes precisely because the subtle analytic elements of the film are not considered. The film's a priori vision (with the authoritarian omniscient intertitles) is used to create that understanding, but, importantly, it does not indoctrinate us. In this way, the subtle epilogue acts as a trigger to our cognitive capabilities, not in the film-makers' vision, but in our own. It is we who judge the exploitation of the working class or accept the economic environment. It is we, who are in turn moved, or left cold. But, this emphatic sensation could not have arrived if we had shut our eyes and ignored the facts. As a well-behaved documentary, A Life in the Day of a Coal Miner does everything to help us digest those facts, finally using its creative elements to stimulate our capacity to think for ourselves.

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